Help...Please!

[Ghull00]

Probably a daft question but..
Last year, I posted a thread on here, saying how my batch of chicks were slowly dying off.....In the end, I had one...
We never fully defined what it was. The birds just slowly got weaker over a few days and then died!
They were unable to walk and ended up sitting in the same place.
Some said Mareks and some cocci! I had always kept them VERY clean.
I just wondered, a year on, whether the disease would still be in our garden?!!
Our other chickens are vaccinated, they're just usual hybrids.
Is it safe to buy chicks? Or can the move trigger diseases?
Is hatching eggs safer?
Please help me...

 

[Hybridchucks]

did you give them vitamin B?

 

[PD-Riverman]

No problem should show up from last year. How old were they when they started dying off??? Sounds like they must have already been out the brooder??

If you hatch your own or buy Good Chicks you can feed them a Medicated feed for a couple weeks. I raise 1000's and I do not even use medicated feed. I always use wire floor brooders(cleaner I feel) if I have them empty(have had so many I had a lot of wood chip brooders going steady) So if you are brooding on shavings----clean often.

 

[Ghull00]

Thanks so much for the reply!
My feed was medicated, I'd guess around 10-11 weeks?? Literally can't remember!
They were starting to have heat less often - as in we turned the lamp off for part of the day. I was always very diligent with cleaning them out but...ah well, it was last year!
The place where we got the chicks, will that be ok? They have loads of pure breds and they are just minutes away?..They never experienced the same issue.

 

[azygous]

Read this article. https://www.backyardchickens.com/articles/the-great-big-giant-mareks-disease-faq.66077/ There's a wealth of information in it regarding all the different diseases that can cause the sort of symptoms your chicks exhibited.

A very real danger is you have Marek's infecting your premises now. It's next to impossible to eradicate, so there's a possibility of new chicks contracting it.

If you bought your chicks from a breeder not NPIP certified against these contagious diseases, that may be the source of the infection.

 

[Ghull00]

All chickens I own are perfectly healthy and the majority were around when the chicks got it. Surely this means if the cage is in a completely different place in the garden(inside a shed), it should be fine??